Humble Inquiry – A Review, Observations, And A Rant

I recommended Humble Inquiry in my article about the Socratic Method, so I thought it was time to write a short review of it, as well as other thoughts that came to mind while I was reading it.

If you want an ultra-short review, it’s a book about asking questions (as you can see from the cover image), but that, of course, would nowhere near do it justice.

More than that, it’s about using a certain type of question to help build and develop relationships, in both a personal and business setting.

The author, Edgar H. Schein, discusses humility first, and in particular, the three types of humility that he believes exists, and the four different types of questions – because not all questions are equal or as effective, depending on the situation.

Of particular interest is the type that is relevant when one person is dependent on another (e.g. for information), especially when that person would usually, according to the often unwritten rules of culture and society, be the “higher ranked” one.

The book gives several good examples and case studies of humble inquiry in action, many drawn from his personal experience, as well as instances where not using this technique caused problems.

He also touches on the culture within the USA, which I find to be spot on, and goes into detail on how to develop an attitude of humble inquiry, because it’s likely not something you have ever been taught.

While reading this book, all sorts of memories and thoughts popped into my head, and here are some of the more salient or interesting ones, in no particular order:

Leadership

The book gives an example of a leader who used to wander around the company and randomly sit down with a member of staff and talk with them.

I have seen an attempt at doing this, and I never found it to be well-received.

The last company I worked for used to have their senior management team (CEO-level and Directors) do the occasional “Walk And Talk”.

The problem was, they were scheduled, not spontaneous, they almost always felt awkward, and you were left with the impression they were only doing this because they had been instructed to.

Most people that I spoke to about their experience of this were nervous and rarely raised the sort of questions and issues that needed to be discussed – because they were talking to a senior manager.

On the other hand, I used to work for a Programme Director who would walk into meetings being held by his teams, unannounced, and just sit in the corner, observing.

He would never say anything (except “Carry on”), and at some point he would get up and leave.

It was unnerving, but you at least got the impression he was interested in what was going on with the projects under his control.

Being Told

The author gives one example where somebody told him something he already knew, not once but twice in a row.

To me, that’s a question of balance and consequences. I would rather be told something twice rather than not all if the consequences of not knowing could be serious.

However, as the book says, there are ways of doing this that do work and some that don’t.

For example, people with chronic illness (e.g. depression, fibromyalgia) often find people approach them and say something like, “You should try…”

In many cases (and I too have been guilty of this with a friend who suffers from fibro), the intentions are good – the person truly wants to help – but the problem is that it can come over as assuming the person wasn’t smart enough to think of that option for themselves.

For the most part, people with chronic health conditions spend a lot of time researching options, especially when the medical profession has let them down.

This is why telling somebody with depression to “snap out of it” is usually received so badly – if it were that simple, don’t you think they would have tried that already?

Another aspect of this is who gets to decide what you should and should not be told.

Personally, I have never liked others deciding what I should or shouldn’t know. I get that, in both politics and business, there are some things that should be kept private, but as a general rule, I would much rather be the one who decides what I want to learn about.

This is a major issue with the media these days, in the USA at least, but I’m sure it goes on in other countries too.

The problem is, the vast majority of the media is owned and controlled by half a dozen corporations, so you can tune to almost any news channel and you’ll hear almost the exact same words, like it’s all been scripted by some centralized office.

People expect news that is local, national, and international, and yet somebody else gets to choose what handful of new stories you should be told about.

That doesn’t work for me, and never has.

At least when I was (a lot) younger, the news was exactly that – reports of events that had happened, with no editorial opinions and people telling you what to think about it.

Again, it’s a question of balance – nobody has the time to sift through everything that happens and decide what they want to read more about, and I also understand that the paradox of choice is a real thing, but being told, without an option, what I need to know is only one step away (if that) from censorship.

Status

Much of the book discusses relative status in a business environment, and I can only surmise that the culture in the USA is very different to that in the UK where I spent all of my employed life.

Even as a trainee programmer back in the late 1970s, it was first-name terms in the office, even when speaking to the senior management team.

When I moved to my next company, a household name blue-chip organization who employed tens of thousands of people, it was the same.

It never felt odd to me, but I get the impression that this may still be unusual in the USA today.

Calling somebody more senior than me by their first name does not imply a lack of respect for their position at all.

It’s similar, to me, to the adage that you should respect your elders.

Even as a child, I felt this was not right.

Why should you respect somebody automatically simply because they were born before you?

What about their character and their ethics, principles and morals?

Should I have respected people like Hitler or Pol Pot, simply because they were older than I was?

Not in my book.

You may also have heard the saying that you should treat the janitor the same way you would treat the CEO, but again, that’s back to front in my opinion.

I think, if you’re going to include any directional bias, it should be that you treat the CEO the same way as you treat the janitor, because the larger point is that if a job in a company needs to be done, then it deserves equal respect.

Yes, different roles have different responsibilities and different salaries, but that’s only to do with the laws of supply and demand.

At my last company, there was a national strike by drivers of petrol tankers, which meant it became increasingly difficult to find anywhere to fill up your vehicle.

And this strike almost caused the building I worked in at the time to shut down entirely – not directly for the reasons you might think, but because they were almost about to run out of toilet paper (aka bathroom tissue), because the people who usually delivered it couldn’t, and that would have contravened the employment laws.

I saw a meme on Facebook recently talking about how there are no such thing as unskilled jobs, and it immediately made me think of the TV series called Undercover Boss. In almost every episode of that show, the boss (usually the CEO or company owner) was tasked with doing a job that some of their most low-paid workers had to do, and very few, if any, could actually do that job successfully.

True, packing boxes may not require the same level of education, knowledge, skills, and talent as some other jobs, but the point is that if it were truly unskilled, anybody could walk in off the street and do it – but they can’t.

So if that job is necessary for the company to operate successfully, then whoever does that job deserves the respect of others.

To me, influencing others because of your authority (e.g. grade, status) alone is not the way to obtain respect or willing compliance.

Just because you are a manager (or higher up the grade structure) does not mean you are better than anybody else – you simply have a different role to play.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you know more about the job than your staff do.

But, as the book discusses, there is a culture that assumes managers cannot ask their staff questions or for advice because it weakens their position and status.

So here’s a question – would you rather work for somebody who isn’t too proud to admit they don’t know something, or for somebody who pretends they do know everything and then proceeds to screw up because of that?

It’s similar, in a way, to parents – many parents will make up answers to their children’s questions rather than admit they don’t know the answer – and that never worked for me either. At some stage in my early teens, or maybe a little earlier, I learned that my father had been wrong about several things, and that revelation further soured my relationship with him.

When I had handed in my notice at the first large company I worked for, my manager had the good sense to have me spend my remaining few weeks documenting everything I knew about the computer systems his team was responsible for, and anything else that I knew about the company, the technology we used, and in fact anything else I could think of.

He made that task my one and only priority, because he recognized that it was likely I knew things that he didn’t, and other members of his team may not know either.

I was specifically told not to worry about whether others may or may not know what I wrote down, because they could determine that after I had left.

He could have had me continue working on whatever project I was assigned to at the time, but making use of my time like that was a much better, nay, brilliant, idea – it demonstrated to me that he valued my knowledge and experience, and that he didn’t presume to know it all. He was thinking about the benefit to his team and the company in general, and not trying to protect his ego, and I respected him for that.

It also reminds me of a large customer service project I worked on, and before it really got off the ground, a team of about 20 or 30 people were sent off-site for a week to hold a workshop (which is fancy modern management-speak for meeting).

At that workshop, which was residential in a hotel about 40 miles from our office, there were people from all areas of the business, and all grades – a director was present, there were managers from various business departments, there were people from the IT area, including myself, and there were people from the customer service department who spent their days actually talking to and helping customers on the phones.

At first, you could see that the telephone operators were nervous about voicing their concerns (e.g. what was wrong with the current systems) and their ideas, because they were used to that way of working, but as the week progressed, they became more vocal and provided a great deal of valuable input, input that only they could provide because their managers (some of whom were also present) could not provide because they had never done that job.

Inclusivity such as that is great, but only if the culture supports it, and that project was the beginning of a turning point for the company, who had finally acknowledged that you cannot design and implement better systems without speaking to the people who actually did the work – because being a manager does not mean you know everything.

And lastly, on this subject of status, many companies and organizations have a rule that managers should not eat (or socialize) with their staff.

I have witnessed this myself – at one company’s head office in London, there were about nine different staff restaurants, from the self-service canteen for the regular staff, all the way up to waitress-service three-course meals in a wood-panelled dining room for the senior staff with restaurant-quality food.

And I have a friend who was once promoted at his work and told he was no longer allowed to eat with his former peers.

These rules are often put in place because of the risk of fraternization and preferential treatment, but those rules are only necessary because of the culture that prevails in that environment.

It’s the same reason why some companies do not allow people who are romantically involved, to work together. In one extreme case I knew of, one of the couple was made to leave the company completely, and not just move to a different department or building.

And I get that – I used to work alongside a guy (with whom I socialized outside of work) who suddenly became one of my staff after I was promoted to a managerial position over him, and it led to one or two very awkward conversations during annual performance reviews.

The only problem with all of this is that the people involved do not like it – they don’t like being separated from the people they work with, and it makes the promoted person appear as though they now consider themselves better or above their former peers.

Asking Questions

The book also talks a lot, not surprisingly, about asking questions, and that too prompted a few memories and thoughts of my own.

In general, it’s been my experience that people don’t ask enough questions, partly because of cultural norms and partly because it makes you look as though you are weak and/or ignorant.

I remember a friend of mine at a magic club I belong to, who, when a visiting magician asked our members if we were already familiar with a certain concept or technique, would always say he didn’t.

This wasn’t because he didn’t know what was being talked about – it was because our club included members of all skill levels and he knew (or, more correctly, assumed), that at least one person was present who didn’t know but was too shy or scared to say so.

By speaking up on everybody’s behalf, he helped those people learn what they needed to learn without them having to admit the fact to everybody else in the room.

Sometimes, too, it’s a case of asking the right question, because people don’t always say what they truly want (and may not even know what they really need to know).

One of my late wife’s favourite sayings, when we were discussing problems and trying to come up with solutions, was “The question you should be asking is…”

She wasn’t always right – sometimes I knew exactly what question I should be asking, which is why I asked it, but sometimes, it prompted me to step back and reassess the real goal of the discussion.

Some companies even employ a person whose job is almost being a professional devil’s advocate – to ask the questions that nobody else dare ask, to ask the obvious in case something has been overlooked, and to point out flaws in thinking.

It was a role I partly fulfilled during my final few years at my last company, and it’s a difficult one if the company culture is not fully open to the concept. (In my case, some people were, and many were not because it challenged their presumed status and authority.)

I was also involved, for a time, in a Knowledge Management initiative, that being a bit of a buzzword during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The idea was sound – working out not only what you do know, but what you don’t know, and then trying to organize that knowledge and make it available to those who might need it – but it floundered. There were lots of good ideas, but trying to cost justify their implementation was difficult.

And I think part of that was because of the old-school motto that knowledge was power.

By that time, the company had been through one or two major restructures, and a lot of staff had been made redundant – even highly experienced ones – so those who remained after the most recent purge were reluctant to share what they had spent years learning for fear that once they had spread that knowledge, their value to the company would be diminished and they’d lose their jobs too.

It was a valid concern, I think, given the culture of the company at that time, because to me, sharing knowledge is more powerful, but only if everybody (from the top down) is open to it.

So once again, it’s about asking the right questions of the right people in the right way, and having trust (which is a key component of the entire humble inquiry process) that once you open up and become vulnerable, you won’t be left regretting it.

Culture

This subject comes up a lot in the book too, in a couple of ways.

Firstly, there is the company culture, which I’ve already touched on. This is usually ill-defined, if at all, and unwritten, but it’s there, and it’s all-pervasive, because it affects a lot of what goes on in the company, including interactions between staff.

More broadly though, there is the issue of different national or even religious cultures.

People from different countries have differing societal rules about many aspects of life, including the way you behave or treat your superiors (whose definition may also be different).

Even simple gestures can be interpreted in significantly different ways – what might be neutral or acceptable in one country might be highly offensive in another.

The books Manwatching and Peoplewatching by Desmond Morris are excellent if you want to dive deeper into this fascinating area.

Conclusion

Well, this has been a bit of a long and rambling rant, so back to the book in question.

A few reviews have criticized it on the basis that it uses a lot of words to explain a simple concept, which is the problem with many books, to be fair, but in this case, I think I disagree.

The basic premise is indeed simple – ask questions to help build a relationship and to get to the real answers, without being a dick about it.

However, there are nuances to this that in my opinion warrant a more detailed examination of what’s really going on, and this book delivers on that. Without being aware of those subtleties, you may get the technique badly wrong, and that would be a shame because I think it’s hard not to appreciate the value in what the author is describing.

There are, as I said, plenty of case studies and examples that may be considered as padding, but without them, I think the impact and usefulness of the book would be lost.

So, overall, I recommend this book – and it’s short enough to read within a couple of hours (maybe a little longer if you take notes while you read it, as you probably should).

And finally, if you’re interested in learning about a Brazilian company who took a radically different approach to leadership and management, employing many of the techniques described in Humble Inquiry, I also recommend Maverick by Ricardo Semler.

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Humble Inquiry
2. Maverick
3. Manwatching & Peoplewatching by Desmond Morris